It does feel really good when you play a new song, and it's the loudest singalong of the night. It means just as much when we're playing the old songs, and people are singing along to those, too.
Nostalgia is one thing. It's great to go and play the old songs. People know them and appreciate them. You got to give them what they want to hear.
I take my hat off to people like the Stones, but it's not for me. I couldn't do that. Jagger is brilliant and long may he rock. I couldn't make my career out of old songs; it would do my head in.
I kind of live by this old thing that time will tell whether people are going to write about this or that; all we can do is be who we are and make records we love, and everything else will sort itself out.
Sometimes when you're with the same old people, you get the same old thing.
Politics are the same old thing. We elect people, we put them in office, and guess what they do? They sell us out. They sell us down the river, and we pay for it.
Why am I not just some old woman ranting in a room? I think because what I say connects with people's truths.
I'm no longer the young woman I was playing before, and I'm in a profession where that continuum that is me is irrelevant to most people - they're meeting me for the first time, seeing me for the first time, and they're seeing an old woman, so that's what I've got to start being.
You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood.
I remember in the early nineties people saying the hat was just for old women, but that's ridiculous.
Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans.
I'm like, 'Wow, I guess a lot of people didn't have this type of upbringing'... that old world technique of, you know, nothing's given to you, you've gotta work for everything you've done... It's just different from what I'm seeing today.
You know when people start talking about freedom they have to be old. They gotta be old-fashioned and really out of touch. Freedom? Well, what's that? Who needs any of that?
I like a good old-fashioned fistfight if people are pissed off at each other. I just feel like if you're really mad and want to have a fight, then put your dukes up.
As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.
People hear traditional jazz and think it's stale, where there are so many ways it can be opened up. With New Orleans and old-time grooves, there's no limit in what can be done with that. I want to break the stereotype of what traditional jazz is.
I think there's an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face - that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.
I found my father through other people, through my older brothers, my high school coaches, so I had men influences along the way who helped me.
I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me.
It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation.
